


Dust and Blood

by rin0rourke



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Explicit Language, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-17
Updated: 2015-11-17
Packaged: 2018-05-02 02:58:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5231309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rin0rourke/pseuds/rin0rourke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His life is a blur of battles, his battles a blur of attacks. His vision is narrow, his focus constricted, amidst the ever insatiable hunger of war his mind knows only to kill what was in front of him, and trust no one at his back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dust and Blood

How Kanda had ended up in this situation, he did not know, and did not bother trying to figure out.

They were with the wrong wagon train, gypsies, ever the mistrustful lot, had split into two groups. Tricking the Finders into believing the innocence was with this one, and so it was with this one Kanda had met up with. Not that anyone had figured all that out until the first Akuma had sprung its attack. Even a gypsy broke a lie when faced with these monsters, and Kanda’s own interrogations were nothing to brush off either.

Annoying enough, being half a country away from where he was actually supposed to be, but now the Finders were insisting on helping the damn people to the meet up point, and Kanda was stuck playing hero right along with them. That, or walk back to the train station, the Gate he came through was half a day’s travel from here.

What fun.

Almost as fun as the stupid ride in the colorfully painted wagons while people who so strongly distrusted them muttered amongst themselves. It didn’t concern him. If he arrived at the other wagon train’s location and the innocence was still not there he would start cracking some skulls, beginning with the idiotic Finders and working his way down.

“The town is just up ahead, sir. Then we can be on our way.” Some person said. A Finder, obviously, but he didn’t bother remembering their faces or names, and he was far too focused on the trees around them to acknowledge the man. 

In a country overrun with valleys and farm fields, they **had**  to be traveling through the one area with a fucking forest. 

Gradually the trees gave way to fields, or what had once been known as such. The earth was torn apart with the craters of enormous blasts, the type left behind from Akuma bullets. The people in the wagons made their anxious noises, Kanda kept his hold on Mugen.

They passed places where little roads forked off towards crumbling houses and shattered barns, a cow passed by, crossing the street ahead of them, limping on a lame leg. Food for some predator, living or otherwise. 

The atmosphere was desolate, abandoned, war torn, yet it lacked that rancid, too sweet smell of death. No carcasses, no blood. Only the faint, all too familiar scent of ash what stuck to the back of the throat, acrid, and putrid as any rot.

“It looks old. Maybe the Akuma have moved on?” A Finder sounded hopeful, and Kanda knew no one was going to recommend they turn around and go the other way. Not his problem.

They came into the town limits, and everyone stopped.

Buildings gone dark, rubble from explosions scattered about the streets, smears of blood across stone and brick and mortar, the oiled cloth awning of a shop lay tattered on a single post like a battered war flag. 

A small childs toy peaked out from the remnants of someone’s garden wall.

All of it lay coated in that ashy powder, the only remains of the people who had once made life here, layering thickly over eachother now in a fine dust that stirred beneath his boots as Kanda lept down, hand tight on the hilt of his sword, and took point.

No, not his problem, but it was his job. 

Inhuman cackling filled the surrounding buildings, bleeding out into the empty streets to crest over the small group in low hungry tones. Kanda shed Mugen of it's sheath, surprise surprise there were indeed Akuma in this town; he didn’t need the Moyashi’s eye to know that as the demonic laughter reached an intolerable crescendo of high piercing glee.

The shadows of the buildings did not so much shift as shatter, dozens of stumbling bodies ruptured out in varying stages of transformation, the human corpses that were their costumes discarded as the insanity of their true monstrous appearance spilled like guts from a savage injury, firing projectiles into the little crowd.

One hit the building to Kanda’s right, showering him in stinging debris that sliced into his face. More screamed past, striking a woman in the chest, took a child’s head in an eruption of blood turned quickly powder.

The Finders sprang to action, barking orders at the gypsies and setting off the contraptions they carried, caging an Akuma here and there in a scramble to clear a path towards cover. The group of travelers were in a panic, pushing against each other, unsure in which direction to go, terrified of the horror that loped into the square. A bullet ripped into a large man’s stomach, with wide shocked eyes he grasped at the injury, and in front of his wife and tiny son he died.

Kanda paid them little attention, they were now only so much dust, charging immediately ahead towards a level 2 with a large candy-striped lance for an arm, feigning to the left he dodged to the right, avoiding the sweep of the lance he shot into the opening given, the creature unable to reverse the momentum of the arch of such a large weapon to attack again or defend itself, and drove Mugen into its belly. 

Like the man it looked stricken down at it's injury, Kanda yanked the sword free and moved on to the next as it burst in a cloud of gas.

The other Exorcists might have been affected by the deaths occurring around him, but he shut it out, remote from the casualties that fed the ever insatiable hunger of war, he slipped into the calm of a soldier. It was a talent that allowed him to do what he needed, what was demanded of him. 

His price for existence.

It did not occur to him strategically to attack the level 2s and leave the 1s to the Finder’s force fields, nor did he consider using the Finders to help navigate the battleground, such things as planning and coordination were luxuries an exorcist did not often receive, his mind was only to kill what was in front of him, and trust no one at his back. The sounds of battle, the taunts of his opponents, the cries of the dying, were regulated to static in his ears, only the contact of his sword against enemy entered his awareness.

He released his illusions, attacking relentlessly, a single slash would kill a weaker leveled Akuma, but the more powerful used their individual abilities. He drove the blade into the armpit of a grinning insect with impenetrable armor, the soft joint giving easily to the blow, howling in agony as the poison of the innocence exercised its perverted existence.

He thrust at another, ducking low to catch it across the knees. It keeled over onto him and the weight was near crushing but he used the leverage to hurl it over and at another who stood firing bullets from a giant smiling revolver protruding from its comically widened mouth. The injured took the projectiles and exploded into chunks that broke apart and rained down like clods of sand.

His world was simplified to dodge and block, pummel, jerk, thrust, shield, sidestep, slash, every movement a lethal purpose. Sweat stung his eyes and every muscle, tendon, nerve, and bone in his arms burned from fingers to shoulder.

His focus remained constricted, but his body knew the movements without thought. Unlike Allen who used primitive hack and slash methods his sword had rhythm of movement, technique, perfected from hours upon hours of repetitive training, he practically danced around the battlefield in a macabre show of violence and power. 

Searing white energy coalesced around his twin swords, crackling up and down the blades, a tendril of power linking them. He rushed the final two Akuma before him, his swords cleaved through them in an impossible number, scoring into their bodies the delicate flower design. Their mockery of life sputtered out and crumbled to powder at his feet. 

And then it was over. And then there was nothing.

Nothing but poison smoke and darkness flavored with the scent of battlefield.

**Author's Note:**

> I once upon a time had a nice long fic outlined where Allen and Kanda worked together on a mission to save a little Rom girl who synchronized with an innocense, exploring Allen's ties to some Romani people during his circus days and occult worship in Victorian London. I had high expectations, devoted hours of outlines and rough plot points, but in the end decided it would be too long and too rambling for what I wanted to actually achieve.
> 
> Still, this fight scene remains one of my best to date; and a simplistic, but vivid, image of Kanda amidst battle.


End file.
